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Red_Fred posted:So what about contrasting this with systems admin? After the set-up it's pretty much monitoring? Sysadmin is just about the dullest job you can imagine, unless you're handling tickets all day. It can get "exciting" from time to time though, which basically means an 18 hour Saturday because the box won't boot or something. Other than that [ASK] me about posting on SA for 7 hours a day
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 21:03 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 08:21 |
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RMS Ghost Rider posted:Sysadmin is just about the dullest job you can imagine, unless you're handling tickets all day. It can get "exciting" from time to time though, which basically means an 18 hour Saturday because the box won't boot or something. Other than that [ASK] me about posting on SA for 7 hours a day Posting on SA is never dull 
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 21:24 |
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RMS Ghost Rider posted:Sysadmin is just about the dullest job you can imagine, unless you're handling tickets all day. It can get "exciting" from time to time though, which basically means an 18 hour Saturday because the box won't boot or something. Other than that [ASK] me about posting on SA for 7 hours a day So then what non-development IT stuff isn't dull?! Sweet jesus.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 21:28 |
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I like to tell people that being a sys admin gives you the room to train yourself on other things, maybe study up on that certification you've been wanting to get. Realistically the downtime will sap your drive to do those things and you end up on SA/some site for the majority of the day. Fortunately for me I recently moved into a DevOps position where I feel like anything I touch ends up in production 2 weeks later. I'm two days behind on my comics, that never used to happen.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 22:13 |
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Ashex posted:Realistically the downtime will sap your drive to do those things and you end up on SA/some site for the majority of the day. The secret is to keep yourself in the loop of new projects so you'll always have something new to work on. I've been volunteering to help implement large-scale storage arrays and Text-to-Speech systems shared between our sister organizations to keep busy, and it's been quite fun.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 22:23 |
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I tried for months, my problem was that I'm located in a satellite office and the rest of IT is at the HQ that I never see. I would harass them to give me projects but it never happened. The one time I got a big project I wasn't able to proceed with it because their ESX servers were low on available ram so they were waiting on a new one to arrive and be installed. I want to say they took the project because I didn't do anything with it but really it's because I moved into DevOps.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 22:27 |
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RMS Ghost Rider posted:Sysadmin is just about the dullest job you can imagine, unless you're handling tickets all day. It can get "exciting" from time to time though, which basically means an 18 hour Saturday because the box won't boot or something. Other than that [ASK] me about posting on SA for 7 hours a day Sysadmin is helpdesk with less user tickets and more THE ENTIRE COMPANY CAN'T DO WORK tickets. Generally this means more loving around, and also more drinking. 
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 22:42 |
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Maybe this is a good thread for it. What is a good VNC application that ties into AD to authenticate? We used to use VNC here, now we use PC Anywhere which is a bloated bag of poo poo.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 22:54 |
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I recently got hired in a sysadmin position at a small- to mid-size company (~120 employees, 3 sites). We're in the process of a complete refresh and consolidation of everything from switches/firewalls to storage/virtualization to desktops/thin clients. It'll probably take us (my co-worker, my boss, and I) the better part of a year before we've got everything in a stable, maintainable configuration. THEN there'll be downtime on the sysadmin side of things, but at that point I hope to be doing R&D on our customer-facing applications too. I guess what I'm trying to say is that sysadmin doesn't necessarily equate to downtime once things are set up and running. If you (and management) keep an attitude of "there's always room to improve" then you shouldn't end up posting on SA 7 hours a day, even in a sysadmin position. I'll also echo what other people have said about continuous learning. The more you know about your company's business and the technologies they use, the more useful (and promotable) you will be.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 23:00 |
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Telex posted:Sysadmin is helpdesk with less user tickets and more THE ENTIRE COMPANY CAN'T DO WORK tickets. Also more people screaming at you because $whoa is missing because something isn't working. Personally I broke my cherry with a Linux server that hadn't accepted a payroll package of some $10 million. I still haven't been able to top it but on the other hand I can always lean back and go "It's not like it's $10 million".  deong posted:Maybe this is a good thread for it. You may get better results in these threads: http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...hreadid=3022717 http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...hreadid=2834226 Crowley fucked around with this message at Dec 13, 2011 around 23:08 |
| # ? Dec 13, 2011 23:00 |
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SamDabbers posted:If you (and management) keep an attitude of "there's always room to improve" then you shouldn't end up posting on SA 7 hours a day, even in a sysadmin position. I'll also echo what other people have said about continuous learning. The more you know about your company's business and the technologies they use, the more useful (and promotable) you will be. This isn't really universal, jfyi. I primarily maintain a giant crufty program (that's nearly as old as I am) on an IBM mainframe. Other than writing new perl there's really nothing that needs improvement, because then you start heading into 'if it aint broken dont fix it' territory. I mean don't get me wrong there's obvious ways to improve the entire operation, but they'd involve burning everything to the ground and starting over.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 23:13 |
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SamDabbers posted:The more you know about your company's business and the technologies they use, the more useful (and promotable) you will be. This needs to be repeated more often. When I was the DR Admin I would just do base builds, when someone would setup an application I would harass them until they showed me how to use it so I would learn a bit more about the companies critical systems. Main reason I got to move to DevOps was because I knew so much about the IT infrastructure.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2011 23:18 |
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Red_Fred posted:So then what non-development IT stuff isn't dull?! Sweet jesus. Yeah, he's on the nose. Unless you're working on constantly evolving projects, anything network and/or systems related is usually "If it works, don't touch it. If it doesn't work, you're working all weekend, if it's 10 years old, you might get to replace it, but see point #1." Basically it's a lot of self-motivated learning, or a bunch of paid gently caress around the internet time. Depends on your personality and personal motivation levels. Heres a basic rundown of my Sysadmin / Network daily job. 1) Make sure nothing crashed and/or caught fire overnight. 2) Make sure nothing hard locked over night. 3) Verify backups 4) Sit through a 1 hour meeting about how everything is working great, but management was "just keeping up to speed" 5) Read and Post at somethingawful.com 6) Read cert training manuals and dream about the company ever paying for classes and/or testing. 7) Go home. Optional tasks include: 1) We hired someone. Set them up. 2) We fired someone. Shut them down. 3) Someone was testing development projects on the live environment. Roll back servers to one hour ago so entire network isn't buttfucked. 4) Re-image a machine because users are dumb. Edit: Additionally, if Improve and Spend Money are ever in the same project list, chances are it's not going to happen unless something was previously on fire. Also this. If you do your poo poo right, you entire job is to make sure you did your job right and the automated tasks are running normal. vvv Digital_Jesus fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2011 around 00:13 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2011 00:06 |
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Red_Fred posted:So then what non-development IT stuff isn't dull?! Sweet jesus. If you are good enough in IT you can ALMOST completely automate everything
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 00:11 |
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Our Systems Admin is fairly busy working on some server or service or helping out the help-desk with issues that go beyond the scope of our authority/knowledge. I think a good Systems Admin should be a jack of all trades with a little less stress on the programming/development side. Its a job where you have to be a self-starter, because you can viably get along without doing a ton of work every day, but its very noticeable when you have a good one on your team.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 01:22 |
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Corvettefisher posted:If you are good enough in IT you can ALMOST completely automate everything Except the goddamn people
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 01:25 |
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Digital_Jesus posted:if it's 10 years old, you might get to replace it
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 01:30 |
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Digital_Jesus posted:Yeah, he's on the nose. Unless you're working on constantly evolving projects, anything network and/or systems related is usually "If it works, don't touch it. If it doesn't work, you're working all weekend, if it's 10 years old, you might get to replace it, but see point #1." I did most of this along with a lot of grunt work for 2 summer jobs wasn't able to find work since so I tried to get into Finance still unemployed and now going back to IT. The lack of knowledge some users have is cute though. It must've been 5 years since I last had a job in IT and I still remember how someone in a supervisor level position completely lost functioning of his computer because of some combination of his own stupidity and a poorly tested anti-virus rollout. Normally I would have re-imaged his machine, but unfortunately he was really adamant about me saving the hundreds of pictures he has of his wife and kids all over his computer. (Why the hell would you do that on a company machine anyway?!) So after about 5 seconds of thinking I decided I'd swap out his hard drive with a spare one I had lying around from an inoperable workstation in my office and just access his old hard drive and transfer all his precious pictures to the newly imaged drive. He honestly thought they were gone forever so when he found out I recovered them all he thought it was a miracle. He immediately sent out an e-mail to me with a CC to my manager explaining how grateful he was for what I did blah blah blah. There are so many simple solutions that people praise you as a genius for. I was just a 3-4 month intern in 2nd year University not even studying IT. If I could do that, anyone can.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 01:45 |
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DerDestroyer posted:
I'm honestly amused at how many people think their files are tied to their OS. Even when they understand a flash drive and how that works, it's still alien that they could do the same with their hard drive.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 02:49 |
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10 months on the hunt for a job. Is it typical for companies to not really list the tier 1 jobs? I usually only see tier 2 and 3 on all the job posting sites I use.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 04:02 |
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snoozeallday posted:10 months on the hunt for a job. Is it typical for companies to not really list the tier 1 jobs? I usually only see tier 2 and 3 on all the job posting sites I use. They're either unlisted, listed after they're filled or obtained via connections. That's been my experience not only with IT work but also finance jobs as well which is what I originally tried to get into before I decided it was bullshit.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 04:11 |
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RMS Ghost Rider posted:Other than that [ASK] me about posting on SA for 7 hours a day This is my life.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 04:18 |
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Digital_Jesus posted:1) Make sure nothing crashed and/or caught fire overnight.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 11:30 |
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evil_bunnY posted:Delegate and automate. drat skippy. Our entire user creation/email/permissions/deletion in AD is 95% automated through HR/peoplesoft, so we only have to deal with the occasional "add this person to this distribution list or security group" that isn't worth automating. Anything that is a repeatable task, I automate with Altiris or other tools so the helpdesk can do it. My boss' ultimate goal is to automate every possible thing that we can, so we can concentrate on bigger projects.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 12:02 |
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Yeah, the infrequency of users coming and going around here makes it not worth automating for the whole 5 minutes it takes me to set up one email account, an AD account and add said account to 3 or 4 security groups. Pretty much everything here is automated, by "make sure shits not broke" I mean "check my email for log files saying poo poo isn't broke". It's when those emails are missing that stuff gets fun 
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 14:03 |
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I really, really want a research position.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 16:32 |
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DerDestroyer posted:There are so many simple solutions that people praise you as a genius for. I was just a 3-4 month intern in 2nd year University not even studying IT. If I could do that, anyone can. Unfortunately as IT people we like to educate others so they don't come back and bug us endlessly, so when we do something that seems miraculous to the user we then proceed to destroy their illusions about how we just performed the impossible by telling them how easy it actually was. I used to do this - now I spin out some bullshit story that makes their eyes glaze over, that way when some manager brings up the "IT is nothing but a cost center" my coworkers and I can look at them and lean back while the other managers whose files we recovered poo poo on the other guy's idea to out-source the IT department. It's all about job security.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 16:55 |
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RMS Ghost Rider posted:This isn't really universal, jfyi. I primarily maintain a giant crufty program (that's nearly as old as I am) on an IBM mainframe. Other than writing new perl there's really nothing that needs improvement, because then you start heading into 'if it aint broken dont fix it' territory. This. A lot of companies see IT as their waste center, so if you want new projects, that's great...but you'll have to wait until the money comes in. And unless something important goes down, that money ain't coming in. So you get a lot of time to dick around and maybe automate some annoying jobs, but mostly IT is either 'look busy so you can justify your pay' or 'oh my god it's on fire now we NEED a replacement.' With some intermittent idiot issues that require a reimage. That's probably the best thing to take away from IT: you'll sometimes get jobs where you can experiment. But most of the time, it's just maintaining stability, and that means you have to find things to do. And the longer you're in that type of environment, the longer you realize that having certifications and the like only take you so far. And that most software packages are becoming more and more able to take care of themselves or be managed remotely, cutting out the costs of having a live IT person on hand. Daylen Drazzi posted:Unfortunately as IT people we like to educate others so they don't come back and bug us endlessly, so when we do something that seems miraculous to the user we then proceed to destroy their illusions about how we just performed the impossible by telling them how easy it actually was. I used to do this - now I spin out some bullshit story that makes their eyes glaze over, that way when some manager brings up the "IT is nothing but a cost center" my coworkers and I can look at them and lean back while the other managers whose files we recovered poo poo on the other guy's idea to out-source the IT department. This as well. Most of my last IT job was making sure they had a reason to pay me. It got to the point where I couldn't have money to improve stuff that I would make up reasons to go 'on-site' and just leave so they wouldn't find me at my desk 'doing nothing.' It can be a high-paying no-work job if you have the right environment, but for the most part there's a reason why IT is being shuffled off to third-party vendors: when stuff works 95% of the time, it's not really worth it to pay someone a wage that won't be as high as hiring someone to come in for the 5% that it doesn't.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 18:28 |
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Unfortunately as IT people we like to educate others so they don't come back and bug us endlessly, so when we do something that seems miraculous to the user we then proceed to destroy their illusions about how we just performed the impossible by telling them how easy it actually was. I used to do this - now I spin out some bullshit story that makes their eyes glaze over, that way when some manager brings up the "IT is nothing but a cost center" my coworkers and I can look at them and lean back while the other managers whose files we recovered poo poo on the other guy's idea to out-source the IT department. That's part of the reason why up here in Canada I was never able to get another Summer Job in IT again. Despite the experience being clearly there and the results speaking for themselves not even the company I worked in wanted to hire me for another summer. I mistakenly believed this meant that IT was dead and tried to get into Finance and then BAM: WELCOME TO 2008 BITCH! YOU WANT A JOB? HERES A BROOM MCDONALDS IS HIRING. The ignorance of the users you support is the greatest source of income you can have. By the way it's funny you guys mention obtaining funding. When I was in Business School I had to take a course called "Management Information Systems" and it was the biggest load of horseshit I've ever had the displeasure to study. The professor adopted this position that IT departments are out of control with runaway spending because corporations hired on IT professionals to run IT departments. Her solution was that IT should be run by management accountants to keep the spending under control . If you want someone to blame for the lack of funding for your department, blame people like my Professor for teaching your managers to be faceless accountants who only see numbers on a ledger.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 18:54 |
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The best is when companies that skimp on IT resource funding have a major outage with emergency purchasing that winds up costing them double or triple what a scheduled upgrade plan would. Boy that $75k upgrade budget sure looks good now with that $150k+ cost of replacement and data restoration, eh fuckers?
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 18:56 |
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Digital_Jesus posted:The best is when companies that skimp on IT resource funding have a major outage with emergency purchasing that winds up costing them double or triple what a scheduled upgrade plan would. Considering BP hosed up an entire Ocean going through a similar decision making process I am not the least bit surprised. I turned down an entry level call center support job at Reynolds & Reynolds because the entire corporate culture revolves around being subservient to managers who knew nothing about what they were managing. In fact you have to take this employment aptitude test which aside from giving you complex mathematical problems you must do without a calculator (and never use on the job by the way) also had an ethics test to verify if you had a problem with being managed by people who were less competent than you. I am not going work rotating shifts starting at 5AM while driving halfway across the country every day just to deal with that bullshit for 30k a year. It's really stupid how companies will hire on technical experts to work in IT but then hire a random well-connected dumbass who may have an MBA to manage you. I was lucky my last IT manager was really hands off and worked out of another city occasionally visiting my office and giving me a pat on the back for a job well done. DerDestroyer fucked around with this message at Dec 14, 2011 around 19:08 |
| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:05 |
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Most companies would love to have competent IT managers. The sad truth is that there really aren't as many as there should be, because a lot of really qualified technical people who really grasp the big picture technically either don't have the soft skills to interface with executive management or don't have the desire to give up hands-on engineering work.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:30 |
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I know working with Access Databases and VB Scripting is horrible, but how many layers of hell are we talking about here? I have a friend who is in dire need of assistance, so I'm trying to find some resources to assist him in learning what he needs for work, and for me to be able to back him up and maybe weasel my way into a new job. Any recommendations?
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:32 |
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RedMagus posted:I know working with Access Databases and VB Scripting is horrible, but how many layers of hell are we talking about here? The lowest layer of hell. gently caress Access it is the cause of all my woes.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:35 |
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Misogynist posted:Most companies would love to have competent IT managers. The sad truth is that there really aren't as many as there should be, because a lot of really qualified technical people who really grasp the big picture technically either don't have the soft skills to interface with executive management or don't have the desire to give up hands-on engineering work. Pretty much. Opinion article below explains the gap of understanding between average management and IT pros from the viewpoint of the IT pro (more or less); decent read. http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...14&pageNumber=1
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:39 |
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RedMagus posted:I know working with Access Databases and VB Scripting is horrible, but how many layers of hell are we talking about here? Why is VB scripting horrible? It's easy as piss and probably most admins first language. Supporting any Office/end-user product is absolute poo poo.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:40 |
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DerDestroyer posted:Considering BP hosed up an entire Ocean going through a similar decision making process I am not the least bit surprised. Agreed. I have the benefit of a good IT manager in corporate who constantly has to spar with the plant manager I've been assigned to because the manager can't delegate non-IT related tasks to me. The people complain about how outmoded our systems are, then in the same breath back off on the implementation because it "we didn't think it would cost that much". Another notion that management seems to have is that the IT department is a rogue group because nobody knows enough about the systems and in turn doesn't trust IT enough. I mean the point of hiring an IT professional is to enable the company to have some sort of in-house expertise right? Also, I love how everybody thinks that creating an Access database will "automate data entry". And it's always somebody from management suggesting this, with no understanding of database design.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:41 |
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DerDestroyer posted:Considering BP hosed up an entire Ocean going through a similar decision making process I am not the least bit surprised. Do you happen to live near Kettering, OH DerDestroyer? The Reynolds & Reynolds HQ is about 10 minutes from my house in Beavercreek and I remember that test you described when I tried applying for a job there. Never even got to the interview, just took the test and got told to have a nice day. So glad I didn't get a job there now.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 19:53 |
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DerDestroyer posted:That's part of the reason why up here in Canada I was never able to get another Summer Job in IT again. Despite the experience being clearly there and the results speaking for themselves not even the company I worked in wanted to hire me for another summer. I mistakenly believed this meant that IT was dead and tried to get into Finance and then BAM: WELCOME TO 2008 BITCH! YOU WANT A JOB? HERES A BROOM MCDONALDS IS HIRING.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 20:08 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 08:21 |
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psydude posted:A college that I worked for took a modified version of this approach: they fired (well, transferred, but it was basically the same thing) the IT director and put a chemistry professor in her place. This person knew absolutely nothing about IT or IT support and basically hosed the entire department over. And I'm willing to bet that the professor blamed their failure all on the "lazy, uneducated and completely unsuitable" IT Director that they replaced.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2011 20:37 |
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